The Mindset Mentor - Ep 107 - Focus or Crash

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

Why is it that when something negative happens that it seems to set off a chin reaction of other negative things? It might not be tat more negative things are happening, it might actually be due to the fact that when you focus on the negative it will make it harder to see the positive around you. This is called inattention blindness and I dive into that topic in this episode. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Before we dive into today's episode, if you would like a free copy of our motivational ebook called Hack Your Goals, the Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success, go to mwfmotivation.com and download it. It's already been downloaded over a thousand times, so go ahead and get your copy now. All right, I'll get you the podcast right now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast

starts now. Welcome to today's episode of the MWF Motivation Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, please subscribe to us, however you listen to us. And if you haven't done so, also go to facebook.com slash MWF Motivation. Join the 10,000 people that currently like us on there. Another exciting reason why you want to like us on Facebook is because of the fact that I finally, my Samsung is open to having Facebook Live. And if you missed it on Wednesday last week,

I actually had my very first Facebook Live event. And there's between 20 and 50 people in the room is going back and forth. And in what it was actually able to do. I was able to communicate live through video, through Facebook's platform with all of the people who wanted to show up. They could ask me any questions that they wanted to. And I spent about an hour answering every single question I possibly could of the 50 people who were in the quote unquote Facebook room, the virtual room. So I am going to do this again

because so many people reached out. I'm talking so many people reached out and say, can you do this every single week? And I can't guarantee that I can do it every single week, but I can try to start doing it more often. So the way you get notified if I do one of these Facebook events is a couple of different ways. Either you can like us on Facebook, events is a couple different ways. Either you can like us on Facebook, MWF Motivation Podcast, or you can actually go to my personal Facebook and friend request me. And if you want to friend request me, you can go ahead and do so. The actual, let me see, it will be episode, go to mwfmotivation.com slash episode, I think it's 107. Let me make sure real quick. Yes. So go to mwfmotivation.com slash episode 107. I'll have a couple different links in there. I'll have a link to a video that you want to see that has to do with today's episode.

And then I'll also have a link to my personal Facebook. And what happens is if you subscribe, quote unquote, subscribe to my Facebook live, then you will get a notification every single time that I go live. And the cool thing is if you can't happen to make it live, even if you want to ask questions, you can watch it later on after it actually ends itself. So that's the cool thing about it. And I'm going to be doing it to get to, excuse me, I'm going to be doing it on Tuesday again. And it's going to be Tuesday at 7.30 PM Central Standard Time. So that would be 8.30 Eastern Tuesday, this Tuesday coming up. And that would be Tuesday, I'm guessing the 26th, April 26th at 7.30 p.m. Central Standard Time.

So go to mwfmotivation.com slash episode 107 and you can click on the link so you get all of the information and know when my next time that I'm gonna be on and you get the notifications as well. So what I'm gonna be talking about today is something called inattention blindness, inattention blindness.

And I've been thinking about this and I noticed how I was thinking about this earlier this week and then something happened today, which made me go, I have to actually do this episode. So I was driving down the interstate and I've noticed this, that it's illegal to park your car on the side of the interstate. And I realized that sometimes people will have their cars on the side of the interstate. It breaks down, whatever it is. And the reason why it's illegal is because people run into those cars. So you can think about it this way. There's three lanes of traffic.

But for some reason, people still hit the non-moving car that's off to the side and not even in the way. For some reason, they veer off into it. Today, I went to a friend's birthday party and we rode these go-karts that were going like 65 miles an hour. And the guy who was actually owns the entire course and we had so much fun today, but the guy who owns the course was a actual Ferrari racer. He raced for Ferrari. Excuse me. It's been a long day. He raced for Ferrari and he said, whatever happens, if somebody spins out in front of you, do not look at their car,

look past their car. He said, don't look at their car because it's like a magnet. If you look at it, you're going to slam right into it because what you focus on is what you're going to go straight towards. And that was, I, he said it today and I was like, I have to do an episode today because I've been thinking about doing an episode on focus and I've been thinking about using this analogy. And then this guy used this analogy today and it was perfect. So inattention blindness means that, I'll give you a quick synopsis of it. Too much information is coming into our minds at one point in time. We have too much coming in at one point in time for the brain to actually get every single piece of information. I read a study that said,

on average, at one point in time, your brain could take in about 22 million pieces of information just by what you're looking at. So what happens is if you're focusing on, let's use this as an example, if you're focusing on the car that's wrecked in front of you and you don't look past the car or look somewhere else, you're going to go straight towards that car because that's what you're looking at. And what you're looking at and focusing on is where you're going to go. So with that being said, if you think about it with thinking negative, if you think about it with thinking positive, the way that you think, no matter what you're focusing on, whatever you're focusing on straight ahead is where you're going to go. If you're focusing on every single thing in your

life that's negative, then the rest of your life is going to be negative. And the thing about it is this, with inattention blindness, what that means is when you're focusing on something, you're blind to everything else that's happening around you. You're completely blind to certain things. And there's a video that I'm going to share if you go to mwfmotivation.com slash episode 107. And the actual video, I'm going to give it away because it makes sense for this podcast. So, you know, you're going to see it when you watch the video, but it's a video of two different teams, two different teams of, I think, five people, one of them wearing white shirts, one of them wearing black shirts. And it says in the video, count how many times the team

in white passes the ball to each other. And so what you're doing is you're watching this video of all of these passes go back and forth. You're going one, two, three, four, five, six, 79. and you get to the end and they say how many was it you're like it was 13. and it was 13 but what you're not realizing is that in the middle of the video there's a guy dressed in a bear outfit that does the moonwalk straight through your vision but you don't see it because you're not focused on it and it's the exact same thing for everything that happens in your life. If you don't focus on the positive stuff, you're not gonna see all the positive stuff around you happening.

If you don't focus on the opportunity, you're not going to see the opportunity. If you don't make your mind focus on specific things, it's gonna focus on something else. So we all know people who are some of the most negative people you've ever met. And the reason why is because they focus on the negative and they can't look at the positive around them because they're literally blind to the actual positive stuff happening around them because they're so focused on the negative.

So with our brain having so much information come in, we blind everything else out when we're not paying attention to it. We don't pay attention to what we don't see. So what can you take from this? From concentrating. The things that you concentrate on is what you're going to get out of your life. Concentrating on the positive things in your life versus concentrating on the negative things in your life. If you concentrate on all of the stuff that's negative, then you're going to have a completely

negative life because you won't be able to see the positive around you. If you concentrate on the reasons why you will succeed versus the reasons why you might fail, and that's a big one because most people look at something and they say, you know, here's my goal, but look at all of the ways that I could fail. I could fail all of these ways versus looking at the goal and go, I could probably succeed if I took all of these routes. And that's the thing that you need to concentrate on is realizing that you need to focus on the reasons why you will succeed versus the reasons why you might fail. Another perfect example is concentrating on the opportunity that you have in the future versus looking at all of the failures that you've had in the past.

Because most people, they know that there might be an opportunity. They know that they might have something in front of them, but then they look backwards and go, yeah, but I failed so many times. There's no possible way that I could succeed at the next thing. So they look at all of the failures behind them, which are behind them, so they should leave them there. But they focus on those instead of looking ahead and going, what could I possibly do to succeed? What are the opportunities in front of me where I could possibly succeed? And it's the perfect example of why I don't watch the news. I was watching a basketball game today and I never watch TV. The only time I watch TV is for sports.

And right after the basketball game, it was on ABC, came on the local news. And it was on for about five minutes. And my girlfriend and I looked at each other and I was like, this is the most negative stuff I've ever seen. Now I know why I don't watch the news anymore. Because it's talking about people getting killed. And then it's talking about a police officer who was killed in duty when he was driving his car and talks about all this stuff. And every single piece was negative. And the reason why is because people are attracted to negative because it's more of an interesting

story. And because of the fact that thousands of years ago, we had to pay attention to all of the negative, all the ways we could possibly die, all of these things, because we had to get away from the berries that John ate and John died. We had to remember those types of things. So naturally, we go towards the negative, but we have to make the conscious decision to look at the positive versus looking at the negative. And that's why if you listen to me when I talk about brainwashing yourself to be successful, is I don't listen to the news. I don't read the news. I don't know what's going on in the presidential election because honestly, I don't give a crap. And I'm going to do another episode on why I don't give a crap who gets elected because they mean absolutely

nothing to me. The time that I could be spending on my business, I would rather spend on my business versus taking a couple hours watching a debate and doing all of those stupid things because they're gonna do what they wanna do anyways. We have very little control over that. So that could be a whole nother episode by itself. But I would rather focus on what I can control versus all of the things that I can't control outside of it.

So with the news, the reason why I say brainwash yourself to be successful, don't watch the news, is because the news is always so negative. So why don't you not watch the news, the reason why I say brainwash yourself to be successful, don't watch the news is because the news is always so negative. So why don't you not watch the news and why don't you listen to podcasts and audiobooks and fill your mind up constantly throughout the day as much as you possibly can with positive stuff, with personal growth, with success stories, with autobiographies of people who had it horrible and found a way to succeed because their success stories and their autobiographies will inspire you. So with the inattentive blindness, inattention blindness,

what it means is what you focus on is what you will see, but you will also be blind to everything else that's around it. So what you wanna take from this episode, focus on, try to concentrate on the positive stuff in your life versus focusing on the negative stuff. When you wake up, start your day with gratitude. What are you grateful for versus all of the things that are going wrong? The next thing, when you think about reasons why

you will succeed versus reasons why you might fail, concentrate on reasons why you might succeed. And also concentrate on the opportunity in the future versus concentrating on the failures in the past. Realize this. And if you want to see the video that I am actually talking about, you can go to, like I said, and you can also get the link to the Facebook and all that

if you want to join our Facebook Live, which once again is going to be Tuesday. It will actually be when this episode comes out. It will be tomorrow for you if you listen to it on Monday. And that will be mwfmotivation.com slash episode 107. And you can join us tomorrow at 7.30 p.m. Central Standard Time. And you can ask me any question that you want. The awesome thing is it's a live video. You can see me. You can hear me. If you've never seen me before because you listen to my voice all the time, you can actually see what I look like, which might be kind of a weird thing for you.

And you can type out questions in the comments. I can actually see the comments, which is the awesome thing about it. So ask me any questions you want to tomorrow whenever you decide to join us on the podcast or see me on the Facebook live event. But with that, I want to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

Make it your mission today to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you go out and you have a positive day because you're focusing on the positive and not focusing on the negative. Have a great day. Well, that's it for today's podcast. If you want the show notes for this episode, they can be found at mwfmotivation.com. Also, if you liked this episode, please spread the love and share it with a friend because it's our mission to help as many people as we can. And to keep in touch, you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

Both handles are at MWFMotivation with no spaces. Now you know what time it is. So go out and make your dreams a reality. Outro Music